


unspoken

by temporalDecay



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/F, F/M, Pseudo-Stream of consciousness, kismesis gone wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-08 06:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7746871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/pseuds/temporalDecay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia is smiling, when she falls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	unspoken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashkatom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Our Lives On Holiday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/580357) by [ashkatom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/pseuds/ashkatom). 



> Includes spoilers for the ending of Our Lives On Holiday, so thread with caution!
> 
> Written as a late birthday gift for Ashkatom, who is the bestest wife. Rie wrote the better half, I'll link to it when she's posted it.

  


* * *

  


unspoken 

  


* * *

  


“So,” Vriska said, breaking the silence weighting down their thoughts into an incomprehensible swarm of self-loathing and forcing her mouth into a smirk even if her eye betrayed how little she felt like being cavalier about the whole affair, “are you coming or not?” 

I could break your neck, Aradia thought instead, her hands clutching Vriska's shoulders to hold her in place while they breathed each other's breath. I could tear off your head. I could rip you apart, bit by bit, collect a pound of flesh and blood for everything you've ever done, and no one would mind. No one would care. 

She thought loud and vicious, her eyes red and bottomless, like the pit of hatred in the half of her gut that was still organic enough to feel that way, until Vriska's eye narrowed as the thoughts curled intrusively in her own mind and she bared her teeth, challenging Aradia to do something about it. 

She liked Vriska better that way: ready to fight rather than dead certain she'd win. She made less mistakes that way. 

“Lead the way,” Aradia taunted, Vriska's lower lip caught between her teeth. 

It was going to be okay. 

  


* * *

  


It has to be me, Aradia doesn't say, because Sollux will not understand it. 

Sollux is good with numbers and computers and things that are by design unfeeling and uncaring. His apathy is one of the greatest reasons she will never let him go, why he needs her more than air. She's the only one that ever could carve out a heart out of the gnarled knot of anxieties and self-doubt he calls a soul. She feels horrible about it, every now and then, when she realizes she's happy by his side, truly happy to be wanted and needed and loved, and she wonders if she's not crippling him worse than Vriska crippled her. 

She holds a special wing of her soul for Eridan, for letting himself die. Not for himself, no, but for what his death did to her moirail. And Aradia thinks, we're not so different, Sollux and me, when she relishes in her own callousness and thinks about all she can't be bothered to care about. 

She looks at Feferi and Karkat and their strenous attempts to care for all trollkind, to fight the inevitable and change the Empire from the ground up, and she is concered – but not surprised – by Vriska's voice venomously whispering in her mind, the futility of it all. 

It has to be me, Aradia doesn't say, because Sollux wouldn't understand and she feels childish by how much she cares about a relationship based precisely on how much they don't. 

It has to be me, Aradia thinks, night in and night out, watching Vriska scheme and spread her influence like poison, forever unrepentant. 

It has to be me, Aradia prays, to gods as unfeeling and uncaring as herself, because she has survived Vriska, the encompassing experience of her, not intact, of course, but good enough, and deep down she _hates_. 

It's for the best. 

  


* * *

  


It's not the betrayal that hurts her. 

She is not hurt at all, by all she could have seen coming but chose not to. 

And in the dark, falling to pieces at Vriska's feet, hatred soared and took her breath away, but not her life. 

She will live forever at this rate, this insistance of hers to not give in to death. 

It's not the betrayal that hurts her. 

She knew it was coming, because Vriska refuses to own something without setting fire to it first, lest somehow she loses it anyway. 

She cannot be burned, she cannot be hurt. 

She stands in the eternity of that single moment, time frozen at her fingertips, and feels the urge to laugh and laugh, because how else it could have gone? 

Irons in the fire, would say Vriska, because she's too blind to see she is the fire the irons prod and suck up dry. 

Aradia is smiling, when she falls. 

  


* * *

  


In the end, she will survive this too. 

She will rise up, a phoenix from the ashes, over and over again. 

She's been to hell already, fire and brimstone it wasn't, but rather red and blue and heartbroken. She survived it. 

She will survive this too. 

She will survive the crawling paralysis holding her in place but refusing to numb the pain. She will survive the knowledge Vriska made sure she knows exactly the moment the scalpel cuts and what little of her is still capable of it, bleeds. 

She will survive the haunted emptiness in Equius' eyes as he carves out all he's spent so long trying to save. She will remember the spectacle of his soul caved in for her to see, his hands steady under the shadow of his choice. 

She will not forgive him, though, that she knows, as soon as he twists in the first port into the hollow of what was once her soul. She will not deign to pity him, even, as much as she understands why he would do what he does. 

She will never allow herself to shoulder the guilt of someone else's sins, she's got plenty of her own as it is. 

But that will be then, and this is now. 

Now she lays there, by choice rather than by force of whatever it was Vriska kissed into her lips, and stares up at the sight of Sollux trapped in wires. It doesn't matter she would have made the choice willingly, if it had been presented to her. It doesn't matter if she can almost hear Equius' rationalizations echoing in her skull. 

This was not her choice, but what follows is: death might be a mercy when it's all said and done, but she will survive it, instead. 

Her only comfort is the certainty that one day Vriska will look back on this and think, without an ounce of mockery: I should have killed her when I had the chance. 

  


* * *

  


Aradia dies, then doesn't. Aradia died, then didn't. 

She will live on, regardless, and that is in itself, both penance and reward. 

  


* * *

  


**Author's Note:**

> This is the weirdest thing I've ever written, I am so proud.


End file.
